October 2020: Books by Incarcerated and Institutionalized Authors

The October 2020 meeting showcased books by incarcerated, imprisoned, and institutionalized authors.  For some writers, their incarceration had nothing to do with their writing.  Some, however, were imprisoned for their writing, while others drew writing inspiration from their time behind bars.  Some wrote while they were incarcerated, while others penned memoirs after their release.  Persons who spent time confined to mental institutions were also included in this topic.

The authors whose works were presented included several famous and prolific writers; and, several members brought different titles by the same author.  Books by other not-so-famous writers of both fiction and nonfiction, including memoirs of their time of confinement, were also discussed.  In terms of being famous—or, in this case, infamous—Jack the Ripper appeared in our meeting.  If a prevailing theory as to the identity of Jack the Ripper is correct, then the man behind the murders printed a book shortly before his disappearance.  The subject matter makes the book all the more fascinating.  Jack’s rare book leads off our selections of books by incarcerated, imprisoned, and institutionalized authors.

 

Jack the Ripper [b. 1841]

The Patristic Gospels

D’Onston, Roslyn.  The Patristic Gospels: An English Version of the Holy Gospels as They Existed in the Second Century.  London: Grant Richards, 1904.  Roslyn D’Onston was the pen name for Robert Donston Stephenson (b. 1841), a military surgeon employed by the British government and living in the Whitechapel area of London in the 1880s. He was also a strong occult follower, though he developed an interest in the early versions of the Gospels in English and had his own translation, The Patristic Gospels, printed in a very limited edition in 1904. The last person ever to see Stephenson was the printer who personally delivered a copy of his book as soon as it came off the press.

Stephenson shared a home with Vittoria Cremers, who became more and more uncomfortable with their relationship over the years, becoming convinced that there was something evil about him. Around the year 1888 he contracted a venereal disease from a prostitute which caused him to be dismissed from his government position, and he combined his occult character with his rage and took out his revenge on five local prostitutes. Though he was arrested twice for the murders, he was never convicted.

In his book Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals (2002), Ivor Edwards presents substantial evidence that the killer was in truth Robert Donston Stephenson. The strongest evidence was the fact that the women had been virtually dissected by someone with remarkable surgical skills. After Stephenson had vanished in 1904, Cremers was cleaning out his room and found a chamber in the back of his closet where there were five scarves hidden which years before had become soaked in blood. The thought was that Stephenson wore the scarves when he committed the murders so that his shirts would not be ruined or bear evidence to his crimes.

Cover and title page of The Patristic Gospels

Since his Gospel translation was never published, copies of the original edition are exceedingly rare, but it has been reprinted in facsimile in recent years. This is a scarce copy of the 1904 first and only printing.

Jack the Ripper's Black Magic Rituals makes the case
for Robert Donston Stephenson being Jack the Ripper

Sir Thomas Malory [b. 1415]

Le Morte D'Authur in two volumes

Malory, Sir Thomas.  Le Morte D’Arthur.  2 vols.  Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1983.  Illustrated by Robert Gibbings.  Edition based on the Limited Editions Society edition of 1955.

Malory’s identity is not fully confirmed, but he was often referred to as a “knight’s prisoner” to distinguish him from other persons named Thomas Malory during the Fifteenth Century.  The designation may refer to a criminal career or his prisoner-of-war status during the War of the Roses, in which he supported both sides at different times.  Accused of many, mostly politically motivated crimes, Malory ended up serving a year in prison. He was pardoned upon the accession of Edward IV, but later changed his allegiance and plotted against Edward IV for which he was again imprisoned.  Unique in English history, so far as is known, he was excluded by name from two general pardons during the War of the Roses, in July 1468 and February 1470.

Oscar Wilde [b. 1854]

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Wilde, Oscar.  The Ballad of Reading Gaol.  North Pomfret, Vermont: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1998.  Illustrated by Garrick Palmer.

Oscar Wilde was charged with two counts of “homosexual offenses”—sodomy and gross indecency—in 1895.  He was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to the maximum of two years’ hard labor.  Wilde served time at three different prisons before being transferred to Reading Gaol in November 1895.  In 1896, a convicted murderer, Charles Thomas Woolridge, was transferred to Reading for execution; it was the first execution at Reading in eighteen years.  Wilde was serving time at Reading during the execution.  Upon Wilde’s release from hard labor, he moved to Paris where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which narrates the execution of Woolridge.

Salome cover and title page signed by the illustrator

Wilde, Oscar.  Salome: A Tragedy in One Act.  Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011.  Illustrated by Barry Moser.  This copy is signed by the illustrator.

The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde, Oscar.  The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray.  Edited by Nicholas Frankel.  Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.  The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in the July 1890 issue.  Without Wilde’s knowledge, the story was heavily edited with a section of more than 500 words removed, fearing the story was indecent as originally submitted.  When it was first published in book form the following year, some of the deleted content was restored, but some material was still edited to tone down the homosexual content.  One hundred twenty years later, The Picture of Dorian Gray finally appeared for the first time in its full, unexpurgated version as originally written by Wilde; the previously unpublished material from Wilde’s typescript was authorized for publication by The Estate of Oscar Wilde.

Anton Boisen [b. 1876]

The Exploration of the Inner World, inscribed first edition

Boisen, Anton.  The Exploration of the Inner World.  Chicago: Willett, Clark & Company, 1936.  Anton Boisen was a pastor and hospital chaplain who was a pioneering figure in clinical pastoral education, an experience-learning-reflection model for educating ministers and chaplains in the art of pastoral care.  The foundations for Boisen’s reflective model of pastoral education were laid out in The Exploration of the Inner World, first published in 1936.  Boisen’s reflections were borne out of his own experience of mental illness, having committed himself to a mental hospital on several occasions following breakdowns after tragic moments in his professional and personal life, such as the death of his mother and the cancer diagnosis of the love of his life, Alice Batchelder.  Batchelder died in 1935, after which Boisen checked himself into the hospital.  Boisen completed and published the book the following year, dedicating it:

TO THE MEMORY OF A. L. B.

For her sake I undertook this adventure out of which this book has grown.  Her compassion upon a wretch in direst need, her wisdom and courage and unswerving fidelity have made possible the measure of success which may have been achieved. To her I dedicate it in the name of the Love which would surmount every barrier, and bridge every chasm and make sure the foundations of the universe.

The Exploration of the Inner World, inscribed association copy

A copy of the reprint edition of The Exploration of the Inner World: A Study of Mental Disorder and Religious Experience, published by Harper Torchbooks in 1962, is an association copy, inscribed by the author to Charles and Margaret Batchelder, the parents of Alice Batchelder.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn [b. 1918]

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander.  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Translated by Ralph Parker.  New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1963.  First English language edition.  Solzhenitsyn, who served in the Red Army during World War II, was imprisoned by Josef Stain’s regime for criticizing Stalin in a private letter.  He was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp and then internally exiled in Russia.  Published in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the only work Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish in the Soviet Union.  The book's publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history, since never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed.

 

Hayden Carruth [b. 1921]

The Bloomingdale Papers

Carruth, Hayden.  The Bloomingdale Papers.  Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975.  Carruth was a poet and literary critic, publishing more than thirty books of poetry, four books of criticism, and one novel.  He was a leading figure in American poetry and received numerous poetry prizes and awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Carl Sandburg Award.  Carruth was institutionalized in 1953 for fifteen months at the Bloomingdale Psychiatric Institute in White Plains, New York, where he was treated for alcoholism, phobias, and anxieties.  He wrote The Bloomingdale Papers, a long poetic sequence which chronicled his days in the asylum.  The manuscript was thought to be lost until a friend, Albert Christ-Janer, found it in the 1970s.  Christ-Janer, an artist, designed the dust jacket for the book.  This copy is a hardback edition in the Christ-Janer dust jacket.  Hardback copies are scarce, as the paperback edition was released the same year.

Martin Luther King, Jr.  [b. 1929]

Why We Can't Wait

King, Martin Luther, Jr.  Why We Can’t Wait.  New York: Harper & Row, 1964.  The book chronicles the 1963 Birmingham Campaign and makes the argument that 1963 is the landmark year of the nonviolent civil rights movement against racial segregation in the United States.  Why We Can’t Wait contains the first appearance in book form of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

On April 12, 1963, King—along with Ralph David Abernathy, Frederick Lee Shuttlesworth, and other marchers—was arrested and detained in the Birmingham jail for violating a blanket injunction against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing.”  That same day, a Birmingham newspaper published an open letter, “A Call for Unity,” penned by eight white Alabama clergy, which denounced King—unnamed but thinly veiled as the “outsider”—and his methods.  Using the margins of the newspaper and other scraps of paper supplied by a friendly black trusty, King penned his own open letter in response.  In the letter, King argues that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to engage in direct action now rather than waiting for justice to come eventually through legal actions in the courts.  The newspaper and scraps of writing were taken out of the jail by King’s lawyers; they were taken to the movement headquarters where others—like putting together a jigsaw puzzle—arranged the scraps of King’s writings into a coherent letter.  Though some excerpts were published in May 1963 without King’s consent, the full letter was first published as “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in June 1963 in the select magazines: Liberation, The Christian Century, and The New Leader.  The Letter then formed the basis for Why We Can’t Wait, published in July 1964.

 

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

King, Martin Luther, Jr.  The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Edited by Clayborne Carson.  New York: Warner Books, 1998.  The posthumously published book is a collection of King’s autobiographical writings arranged chronologically to tell his life story, as Coretta Scott King described it, in his own words.  It includes “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and situates the letter within a transformational year in King’s life: 1963, after the Albany Movement and the Birmingham Campaign, and before the March on Washington.  This presentation copy of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. contains a gift inscription from Coretta Scott King to her friend John Cox.  Cox was a community organizer who helped Mrs. King form the Historic District Development Corporation to preserve the King family home, and who served as one of the founding board members of the King Center.